How to Prepare For a Disaster: Three Key Tips You Should Try

by Lauren Ellman ·
Published January 19, 2017 · Updated February 6, 2017

Learn how to prepare for a disaster. All businesses are vulnerable to costly IT disasters. For example, CSO Onlinereports that by 2021, cyber crime will result in $6 trillion losses every year. And cyber crimes aren’t the only kind if IT disaster businesses suffer through. Equipment failures, flooding and fires, and employee errors (such as accidental file deletion) are all alarming possibilities.

You don’t want to get caught off-guard by an IT disaster. If you’re better prepared, it means you’re less likely to suffer permanent data loss and lengthy downtime. You’re more likely to recover quickly, saving money and preserving your business’s reputation.

The following are three key tips on how to prepare for a disaster:

Comprehensive data backups. Make sure your data is backed up in a reliable way. This is critical for your most important files and programs: the ones you need for operating your business and the ones that contain sensitive information. With comprehensive, timely, and well-protected backups, you can easily retrieve and restore the latest versions of your most important data. In this way, you’ll quickly get your business up and running again and spare yourself from staggering financial costs.

Don’t keep everything in one place. If you keep all of your data and other important assets in one location, a single concentrated disaster can inflict serious, lasting damage on your company. One helpful strategy is to rely more on the cloud and its off-premises solutions for software usage, data storage, and other IT functions.

Invest in prevention. Preventative measures are cost-effective because they can often detect and address problems at earlier stages, sparing you from many kinds of full-blown disasters. For example, round-the-clock network monitoring can pick up on signs of impending equipment failure or evidence of suspicious activity that might be a cyber attack. IT professionals who take a proactive approach to IT support will help your business stay vigilant, plan for potential future threats, and catch problems early on.

Please contact us for additional information on how we can effectively prepare your business for an IT disaster.